Towards Connecting the Disconnected Internet

We live in a world where social and economic disparity has led to many 'disconnects' that collectively provide unfair bias towards the top 1 % of of the wealthiest individuals and elite industry behemoths. This bias can be seen in the technical world leading to ‘disconnects' including limited access to broadband access and advanced technology. In this paper we identify hidden 'disconnects' that we believe are stifling innovation. We introduce an abstraction called 'application systems' (APPSYS) which, with more development, could move our Nation's disparate forms of large scale technology use (Facebook, Tik- Tok, and ‘the Internet’) to a technology fabric that includes current Internet applications but supplemented with an overlay of APPSYSs forming a ‘tech-fabric’ that can benefit all citizens, and that promotes citizens to contribute to the evolution of the concept. The ‘fabric’ is potentially a merging of our Nation's Critical Infrastructure with commercial innovation. These two worlds historically have been isolated however there are clearly overlaps and synergies that can no longer go unchecked. As the Nation enters the ‘Age of Machines‘, this fabric would provide the unique architectural model required to facilitate more secure, dependable Critical Infrastructure in a manner that reflects Internet-like attributes such as transparency, and policies/protocols for joining individual Autonomous Systems to form a unified system. Critical to the concept is an APPSYS which will have incentives to ‘contribute to the greater good’. In this paper, we summarize the APPSYS concept and identify necessary incremental mandates by the FCC to broaden access to advanced technology for all citizens primarily by shifting the FCC's bias away from current policies that promote the disconnect between economic success centered on the allocation of wealth that has seen the allocation move from 80- 20 (80 % of the wealth is owned by 20 % of the population to the current 90–10 allocation split.